Feds to probe Comcast's BitTorrent busting

This is a surprise??

Verizon also does this. And they also go so far as to block any and all incoming data requests directed at their DSL users. But don't think it's easy getting them to admit it. Their solution: you have to get a static IP, which they only supply to businesses.

When the revolution comes, they will be the first against the wall... Right behind the lawyers... And the politicians... And Paris Hilton...

Ok, I'm sorry about the last one.

See, I have my coat. And I'm gone.

reasonable disclosure

If the 'war on terror' has taught us anything, its that 'if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear' - perhaps comcast should bear this in mind when informing us of their policy?

About F@#king time

In the end, this won't amount to much and Comcast will likely lobby to do this legally in the future (under some pro-america pseudonym). Still, it's nice to see this get some official notice... Where the heck is our American government? Oh... in Iraq.

Reasonable network *management*?

Don't make me laugh. Those wankers at Comcast allow thousands of spam messages a day to try and hammer my mail servers. Since their networks are transmitting all this spam, _and_ whatever payload is contained in it, their notions of "network management" is screwed. If they dropped all that spam traffic (we're based in Australia for god's sake, how many other networks are they spamming?), they'd probably have the bandwidth to allow torrenting for the entire Western world.

Same goes for Verizon, and Roadrunner. In other words, 3 of the largest US ISPs appear in our top-five spam networks. Network managment my arse.

They ARE back in the Dark Ages

The Japanese or other folk who get marooned in the US and have to use what is euphemistically called "high-speed Internet access".

High-speed access in the Free World is generally 10 Mbit/second or higher (my router currently reports 13996 Kbit/second, which is about average for the service I have here in Singapore). I can get 100 Mbit/second for about US$60 (rather than the US$~35 I'm paying now) but this is fine for what I use it for. My understanding from my Korean friends is that 1 Gb/second is being rolled out to home customers now.

And the Japanese? When I lived there almost ten years ago, 10 Mbit wasn't uncommon; my understanding is that they're now approximately neck-and-neck with the Koreans. The only country I've been to lately that's as self-righteously primitive as the US has been Malaysia, where 4 Mbit is the brand-new "woohoo!" high speed - with 128 Kbit/sec upload. Don't even bother trying to do videoconferencing.

One of these millenia the US will catch up to where the rest of the world is now.... probably about the time 100 Gbit optical becomes pervasive out here.

Stupid Western ISPs need to watch the Jap's 4 inspiration

This stinks, I believe this is happening due to the infrastructure simply not being anle to cope with all the traffic and ISPs not wanting to invest in lines to carry more data; my Virgin 4MB line is throttled to ONE MB instead of the 2MB advertised on their "traffic management" webpage and they send you round in circles between customer services and tech support who both say you need to contact each other to resolve the issue...which doesn't occur.

I would LOVE to be in the far east to get some sort of decent internet speed but I'll not have that chance for many years at which point I'll hopefully not need to bother!

To spoof or not to spoof.

For the arguments on "forging" where does one draw the line between spoofing and transparent caching? It's the same thing.

"Thou shalt not spoof packets" is a bad rule.

Obviously comcast does not seem to be transparently caching - at least for bittorrent, but a cache also spoofs - yet we accept it every day because the spoofing benefits us.

Let comcast do what they want. Nobody forces you to use comcast. Nobody has a "right" to use all the networks between points A and B. To claim such a right is patently stupid and violates the whole concept of private property rights of the owners of all networks involved.

Comcast needs to burn!

Comcast like ALL the rest of the US ISP's are plodding along on the technology scene like it stopped evolving back around the time the ATAPI interface was introduced into the PC standard. Why is DSL still around? Why is there only ONE major fiber optical ISP in the US?

Comcast didn't increase their network capacity properly and their network is suffering for it. But, Comcast will say its NOT their fault, its the fault of those utilitizing the "unlimited" feature of their UNLIMITED internet package. P2P applications are part of that unlimited internet use. To go throwing bad packets into the mix or doing network "management" is just bad business. Customers shouldn't be punished because their Company providing the service isn't up to snuff.